In a letter written to Pamela Hansford Johnson on 15 April 1934, Dylan Thomas describes what she means to him in terms that identify their interdependence and separation from the rest of humanity with a reimagining of the link between spirit and body:

The room contains two lovers, an airborne spirit, and a mangy dog, but the relationship between all these things is curiously indefinite and mutable:

Writing without thinking, Thomas instinctively connects the figure of the dog with access to another plane of existence, one in which vision is merged with audition, the spiritual with the animal, the one lover with the other. In the everyday world of the young freelance journalist, this is ‘nonsense’, but in the insistent clairvoyance of Thomas's poetry, it is a thoroughly characteristic transformation; one that turns to the figure of the dog quite naturally, as the photographs of Pentti Sammallahti do (Figure 2.1). John Berger's essay ‘Opening a Gate’ examines the work of the Finnish photographer in order to come to terms with the kind of secret knowledge it seems to impart. Berger himself owns a number of Sammallahti's photographs and observes, ‘In each of these pictures there is at least one dog.’ Dogs gradually become the focal point of the essay, which ends by placing the photographs to one side in order to concentrate on the significance of the special relationship between canines and humans. For Berger, this relationship invites us to recognise the validity of other, non-human ways of experiencing the world: